Thursday, 8 March 2012

Meshuggah versus the league of djent-lemen (v2)

This
article started out as something quite different to the way it ended up. Just
as I was finishing it up, I read a review of Koloss and an accompanying comment which summed up everything I had
tried to express to that point, albeit more succinct and precise. It happens.
Instead, I decided to take that thought as a starting point and redo this
article from scratch. First though, a quote from the abovementioned review
(found at NO CLEAN SINGING)

“For the first time ever,
minimalism is the watchword. For example, Koloss
launches right into the tank-tread chugging of “I Am Colossus,” with Kidman’s
vocals following the rest of the music in short succession. Almost like
hardcore punk, Meshuggah disregard the intro, and skip right to the meat of the
music. Then, much like the one-two punch of the best heavy album openers [...]
“The Demon’s Name Is Surveillance” launches into a more rapid attack, as if the
engine of the band kicks up a gear and explodes from suburban street to
highway. What does that mean? Moshing. Headbanging. They will happen with great
frequency and at prodigious magnitude.

It also makes Koloss out to be a willing step away
from Djent. If their followers have been adding more and more flourishes to
their music, putting on fancier clothes if you will, Meshuggah have been
lifting weights — exchanging aesthetics for killing capacity. The difference between Koloss and ObZen is like the difference between Chaosphere and Destroy Erase
Improve.”

There are three points of
relevance to me in this review. The first is the identification of Koloss with
“metal” via moshing and headbanging. This is very important. Djent, in its
current form as practiced by groups such as Periphery, Tesseract (do I really have to
capitalise that last “T”?), Animals as Leaders, Cloudkicker, Monuments,
Vildjharta and Uneven Structure, is primarily
concerned with abstract technicality and production aesthetics. It elevates
form over function to such an extent that although it contains elements of
metal: powerful, sonically dominant rhythms, distorted guitar tones and even
non-clean singing, it seems somehow distant, divorced from metal. Which is odd
considering how metal - especially genres such as technical and brutal death
metal - frequently makes use of
precision at a hyper level. This leads to the second point: Koloss, however, is squarely connected
with metal tradition.

Although it risks
treading misogynist/homophobic stereotype waters, the truth of the comment –
“If their followers have been adding more and more flourishes to their music,
putting on fancier clothes if you will, Meshuggah have been lifting weights — exchanging aesthetics
for killing capacity”, nevertheless holds
true. Koloss sounds like five metal
heads in a room laying down the jams. Even if it was not recorded that way-
that is how it sounds. There is a lean, limber, muscle rippling strength and
confidence at the heart of this new album. On a recent revisit to the djent
canon by way of the luminaries listed above I could not help but to notice an inherent
fragility in the compositions, a tense sense of creative, yet contained
explosion. An ideas big bang of sorts which picks up fragments of this and that
and assembles them into something new. The problem, however, lies with context.
This is a kind of metal not made by dudes (whether male or female) in a room
but solitary composers enveloped in social media. The context of creating this
new form of metal could not be further from metal’s origins.

And now the third point:
if Koloss is more hardcore punk in
its approach, in that it cuts straight to the meat that is because at its core,
Meshuggah has always been a metal band. They arose from a tradition that saw
them move effortlessly through the tail-end of thrash, through old school and
new school death metal, to nu-metal and metal/deathcore along the way without
fundamentally altering their sound. Therefore, if Meshuggah are a metal band,
then what exactly are djent bands?

As I wrote above, djent
draws on stylistic elements from metal and foregrounds technicality above all.
Djent is largely a solitary endeavour governed by the rapidly shifting torrents
of information swirling about the social media landscape within which it is ensconced.
Djent is also a relatively new genre, which like many contemporary cultural
developments has seen itself attain legitimacy and truth value at a speed
incongruous with duration of existence. Cultural products of the social media
sphere, seem to me to embody the zeitgeist of post millennial capitalism in
which novelty, disposability and obsolescence are almost perfectly realised.
Thus it is possible to say, in spite of its appropriation of some of metal’s
more extreme musicological elements, djent is essentially a form of pop music
in a post-physical media music marketplace.

Bear in mind that this
is not a value judgment on my part of djent as a form of “legitimate” or “good”
(metal) music. Instead, it is a conceptual and contextual positioning of the
genre in relation to how it is being made and distributed and its relationship
with an older form of (metal) musical expression. Personally, there are aspects
of djent which are interesting to me. The integration of electronic timbres and
deliberate calculatedness of meters blurs the boundaries between complex
electronic music (drill and bass, IDM, technical dubstep) and more traditional
notions of progressiveness as frequently found in metal. Further, its general
predisposition to hybridization and musical cannibalism makes it similar to
jazz and in that respect, commendable.

Where it tends to fall
flat for this listener is that sometimes it is both too aware of its existence
and connection to the present and is unable to properly conceptualise itself within
the broader metal tradition. In almost all leading examples of the genre I
found the frequency of regression to the recent past of metal/deathcore and emo
to be somewhat excessive. In other words, the melodic zeitgeist of contemporary
metal of the second half of the first decade of the twenty-first century seems
to weigh somewhat too heavily on their compositions. This in itself is not a
negative and perhaps it is an inevitability, after all that was the metal these
artists likely grew up on. So while this is a sound that does not particularly
interest me, it will be interesting to see whether djent has the fuel to attain
mileage for a second or third wave wherein it begins to cannibalise itself,
locate its compositional clichés and reconnect with metal tradition.